


Take My Hand / Take My Whole Life Too

by kdora96



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Adventure, F/M, M/M, Romance, let's hope i can finish this before the semester starts, otherwise y'all will have to pray for me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-15 01:00:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9212531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdora96/pseuds/kdora96
Summary: Soulmate AU where whatever is drawn on one person shows up on their soulmate's body - but what happens when the connection deepens and even the Force cannot tell the difference between ink and bloody scars?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey y'all! So this story will be a slightly longer version than what I posted on tumblr (oceanofinsanity.tumblr.com come check me out!) so it will most likely follow the plot of Rogue One...possibly. Subscribe to this story, and come along on this journey with me!

Jyn had never been the artistic type.

All of her drawings are doodles on her tablets while Saw Guerrera tried to teach her the basics of every language he’d come across during his time in the Alliance. The information had come in handy a few times; Jyn wished she’d paid more attention, but who could blame a six year old kid?

She had liked drawing circles in the corners of her pages, paper suns illuminating her dark world.

Therefore, when the first drawing appeared on her leg, she stared at it for a full five minutes.

It was a flower. And not just any flower. It was a drawing of a flower that she had never seen before. Its petals were long and sharp, breaking out into a circular format. She wished there were color, and right in front of her eyes droplets of color began appearing on her leg. Each petal became a vibrant shade of red, and for a split second Jyn thought she was bleeding.

When the colors stopped appearing, she gently traced her fingers over the pattern.

“Where are you from,” she muttered. She’d heard of such stories, soulmates coming together through drawings. She’d heard these stories from the older women, the ones who remembered the fall of the Republic, stories of the before. Before Lord Vader, before darkness, before.

Jyn blinked, and carefully extracted a pen from a small pocket in her sleeve. She'd been saving it for an important reason. Jyn paused for a moment, and then began drawing.

 

Cassian jumped at the sensation of a slight tickle on his palm.

He’d left the tattoo parlor fifty credits lighter, but satisfied with the result. He had never seen these types of flowers anywhere except on his home planet; it wasn’t homesickness, not quite, but there was something peaceful about seeing that flower engraved forever upon his skin.

That is, until words began appearing on his palm.

For a second, Cassian thought he was cursed. His culture, he could recall, frowned upon tattoos and any kinds of permanent markings that could be made on the human body. He whispered a quick prayer in his native tongue, then squinted.

The words that were appearing on his hand did not resemble a curse at all, or even any form of punishment. Instead, they looked like…scrawls.

“H…e…l..l..o,” he muttered aloud as each letter appeared in a short, cursive text. “What the…”

The phase ended at hello, as though waiting for him to continue. He looked around through the crowd, wondering if someone were playing a practical joke on him. No one paid him any attention, except to shove him out of the way.

So, Cassian did the first thing he could think of. He went back to his ship.

“K-2!” He called out, almost immediately upon entering. The ink on his palm had yet to leave his skin. ‘K-2, where are you?”

“Here, oh great Captain,” K-2SO responded, coming out from around a corner. “This ship is turning into a wreck-“

“Explain this!” Cassian thrust his palm into the droid’s face.

“Captain Andor, this is a palm. It is a section of the human body-“

“No, not the body part, you idiot. The writing. It just appeared.” K-2SO inspected the single word with a closer scan.

“Writing that just appeared – interesting.” He paused for a moment, his white eyes flickering as his circuits went through his databanks. “There are a few options. One is a strange disease located only on Venir 6, but my memory does not recall you being there.”

Cassian shook his head. “It wasn’t painful at all. Ticklish, if anything. It felt like someone was writing something on my hand.”

“An invisible person?”

“Not likely…I was in the middle of a crowd, and moving my hand a lot.”

K-2SO paused for another second. “This next option seems unlikely but…there are stories of happenings similar to this. A type of soulmate, if you will.”

Cassian snorted, and lowered his palm. “Soulmates. That disease is more likely.”

K-2SO’s eyes continued to flicker. “There are many stories of these accounts. They are old, yes, but they were uploaded into my memory for some reason – perhaps one of the Imperial guards had enjoyed a relaxing story before bedtime.”

“How human of them,” Cassian quipped with a sigh before sitting back down in his pilot’s seat. “The tattoo’s done, now let’s get back to-“

“Your tattoo.” K-2SO’s voice sounded as close to an exclamation as Cassian supposed it ever would. “Now it makes sense. You were never allowed to write on your skin before, but now that you have, the other person can feel it, too.”

Cassian had to admit it to himself; these stories had captured his interested.

“Old wives’ tales, no more than that, but there were stories of soulmates discovering each other through writing. One would write something on their body, and it would appear on their soulmates’.”

“What about when I’m fighting, and get cut?”

“Must be like a sort of fail-safe – the writing only appears if it is delivered painlessly.”

Cassian felt suddenly grateful that this other person, if K-2SO’s theory was even slightly correct, had not had to suffer the same scars that he had had to go through for the Rebellion.

“So if I write back…do you think they will get it?”

“Your vocal shift indicates that you might be starting to believe these tales.”

Cassian chuckled. “It wouldn’t hurt to have some…magic in this world that we can see. Or perhaps it’s just the Force acting in a different light.”

He grabbed a pen before the adrenaline could leave him, and started to write on his palm.

 

Jyn twirled her pen around her fingers. _I was so stupid to believe those tales_ , she thought to herself, staring straight past her cell door.

_But the flower-_

_Probably a curse, with my luck_ , she thought to herself. She’d been lucky enough to find a pen in a prisoner’s contraband, but I should never have traded my meal-

She gasped, and opened her palm. It was tingling.

Her “hello” had begun to fade; a bit of a cheesy introduction, but she had no idea what else she could’ve written to begin. The new scrawl was much messier than hers, with fewer loops and more jagged edges.

“Are…you…r…real?” She finally managed to read, with a lot of squinting. She blinked, and tried again.

 _Well that’s a lovely introduction_ , she thought, but grabbed her pen nonetheless. She wrote out her loopy scrawl, then paused, unsure how much more she should reveal. He could be an Imperial officer, for all she knew. Or worse – someone from Saw Guerrera’s company, a group of people who abandoned her and left her to fend for herself. She frowned, mentally going through everyone in the group.

 _If any of them end up being my soulmate, perhaps I should just rot in this cell_ , Jyn thought ruefully, and decided to keep her answer to its one-word length.

 

“Yes,” Cassian read aloud, his heart beating. It had been written very clearly, slightly below his wrist.

“That’s it?” K-2SO asked. “Very disappointing.”

“They might have been interrupted,” Cassian responded, with a bit more anger in his tone than he’d expected.

“Interrupted? What if they’re part of the Empire, or some weird-“

“Always jumping to conclusions, K,” Cassian replied, turning back to the ship’s control panel, and wondering in the back of his mind if this was all some spice-induced hallucination. He shook his head, as if that would have made the effects wear off any faster, but when he opened his eyes the words were still on his wrist and palm, clear as day.

Pulled by his curiosity, Cassian grabbed his pen again.

“Cassian, the Senator is waiting for you.” K-2SO said, flipping a few switches. “StarForge Station was supposed to be a short detour-“

“Hold on, K,” Cassian growled, his pen moving all the faster. He threw it down when he finished, and pulled the accelerator.

“There, happy? We’re off.”

 

Jyn felt a small tickle once again as she was being herded to her new cell. Her roommate looked about as kind as the other one, although she supposed that she herself did not look very approachable, covered in dirt and wearing a scowl that seemed to fit more naturally onto her face than a smile.

She sat down onto her cot and gave her roommate an angry stare, one which was promptly returned for a moment, and then dropped.

Clearly her new roommate did not wish to fight for dominance as much as her previous one. Perfect. Jyn sat on the edge of her cot, careful to keep one eye focused on her cellmate, and lifted up her sleeve.

_Do you think this has happened before?_

Jyn read the words in her head, and then read them again. It sounded like the question of a child, tugging on his mother’s sleeve and asking if the fairytales she read to him at night contained any sort of reality. This scrawl was incredibly messy, as though the other person had scribbled it down in a rush.

She gently shook out her pen from where she’d hidden it in a pocket in her sleeve.

_Do you think this has happened before?_

The words rang in her brain. She had never allowed to herself to think about the before. That dark time contained memories of her father, her late mother, whatever the hell Saw had been in her eyes…no, there could only be the now.

Jyn pursed her lips, and picked up her pen again as memories of the stories came flooding back. She recalled her mother’s voice, so soothing and low, whispering beside her bed as she drifted off to sleep. She wondered, briefly, if her parents had been soulmates. If they had met by drawing on their own skin.

She heard the footsteps of an approaching Stormtrooper, and scribbled out an answer as fast as her cramping hand would allow.

 

Cassian grimaced, and almost jerked the wheel of the X-wing, but managed to steady himself. If K-2SO had eyebrows, Cassian imagined he’d be raising them at his actions.

“Is it your soulmate again?” The captain could practically feel the droid smirking.

“It’s the ghostwriter, yes,” Cassian responded. “Soulmates only exist in stories, K.”

Cassian stared out at the stars. No asteroids in sight, no planets, no Imperial ships. Just darkness and pinpricks of light. He sighed, and rolled up his sleeve. The words written on his skin made him chuckle.

“Only in stories,” he muttered aloud. “So what does that make us?”

Even the reprogrammed droid couldn’t come up with a response to that question.

“We’re almost back at Yavin IV,” Cassian remarked, pulling down his sleeve. “If the extraction went well, pretty soon we’ll be meeting with the famous Jyn Erso.”

“Do you really suppose she’ll help us find her father?”

Cassian shrugged. He’d stopped the pretense at empathy a long time ago. “One can only hope.”

He looked at the stars once more. They seemed to wink at him. He sighed, and tugged at his sleeve once more. He took out his pen, and scribbled down a sentence.

“Stories always have a spot of truth in them,” K-2SO remarked.

Cassian sighed. “I thought you were a droid, not a storyteller.”

“I’m just saying, for someone who doesn’t believe in stories, you seem to be going along with this one.” The droid’s white, flashing eyes stared straight ahead, as bright as the stars.

“Let’s just focus on meeting this Erso, alright?”

Almost immediately, he gasped in pain, and pulled his aching palm away from the wheel. 

"What the-"

The new message was appearing in bright red, carving itself slowly into Cassian's palm.

 

Jyn stared straight ahead as she felt a tickle on her upper arm. She was quickly running out of space to write, and in shackles, one can only move one’s arms so much. With some difficult maneuvering, she managed to pull up her sleeve to her elbow, and read the new words.

_What’s your story?_

She supposed the other writer must be some kind of hopeful novelist, whiling away his hours on some long-lost planet.

 _Perhaps he’ll write a story in which I break out of this hellhole_ , she thought. She took a quick glance around. No one was paying attention to her, but there was no way she was going to risk pulling out what could be considered contraband on the shuttle headed to a grueling day of labor.

Jyn’s eyes caught sight of a stray screw, lying carelessly in the open. As nonchalantly as she could, she grabbed it with one hand, and started scribbling onto her free palm. The marks she was making were deep enough to make her wince, but she had long ago learned to suppress her facial expressions.

 _Perhaps blood will travel across as well as pen_ , she thought briefly before the shuttle suddenly stopped and her entire world was blown apart.

 

Cassian stared at the young woman standing defiantly in front of him. Despite her strong demeanor, there was something gentle hidden deep within her green eyes.

His palm still ached from the last, short message. _Jail. What kind of story starts in a jail?_ _Damn K-2, I should reprogram him to get all of those stupid tales out of his head…_

And yet, his mind wandered. He blinked, and realized the senator had been gesturing to him. He eyed Jyn up and down, and came closer.

“What do you know of Saw Guerrera?” His interrogations had never been anything, if not straightforward.

“Nothing, except that he abandoned me when I was a teenager. Haven’t seen him since.”

_A very matter-of-fact tone for someone with nothing left to lose._

_It’s like looking in a mirror._

“A pilot defected from the Imperial army. We have information that he was sent to Saw by your father.”

Something flickered in Jyn’s eyes. A distant memory, perhaps, that she’d tried all these years to keep locked up.

“Would he recognize you if he saw you now?” Hope. This entire mission relying on an old man’s memory being even slightly functional.

Jyn shrugged. “What do I get if I come with you?”

“Your freedom.” Senator Mon Mothma responded before Cassian even had time to open his mouth. Jyn smiled.

“Sounds good to me,” she replied. She stuck out her gloved hand, and Cassian stuck out his, similarly gloved, hand.

They shook, a pair intertwined through stardust.


	2. Chapter 2

On the way out, Cassian caught General Draven’s eye and moved to the side.  He pointed out his ship for Jyn, and watched her walk away.

 

“The plans have changed slightly, Captain.”  Draven began.  Cassian ignored the sudden tickling sensation that touched at his upper arm.  He allowed himself to wonder what the next possible message could be after _jail_ , before blinking and forcing himself to focus on the General’s words.

 

“…Too dangerous to be kept alive.”  Draven’s eyes were stone cold gray.  “Use Erso’s daughter to find Galen, and then take him out.  This is on a need-to-know basis.” 

 

Cassian nodded curtly, and left for his ship, his mind thrumming.  Killing Tivik without mercy had been buried deep within the recesses of his mind, along with every other life he had ever taken.  Every name, every face imprinted on his brain.  He wondered if Galen Erso’s will fit in as nicely with the crowd, with his daughter staring right up at him with her green eyes.

 

He sighed, and entered the ship, ignoring Jyn and heading straight for his seat. 

 

“Why does she get a blaster and I don’t?”  K-2SO’s metallic voice jostled Cassian out of his reverie.

 

He spun around on his heel, his upper arm still tingling with the unread message.

 

“Where’d you get that?”  He doubted she would use it on him, but there was always the chance-

 

“Found it,” followed by a shrug.  Cassian gave her a quick once-over one more time and, despite the horribly wrinkled state her shirt was in, found nothing amiss.

 

“Trust goes both ways.”

 

Cassian sighed, but nodded.  With K-2SO spouting the odds that Jyn might use the blaster on him (hint: it was high), Cassian quickly rolled up his jacket sleeve.

 

There were new words on his arm.

 

_Moved to a prison of a different kind._

He wasn’t sure what quite came over him.  Perhaps it was the fact that he could hear Jyn making herself comfortable in the background, or a desire to prolong the fact that he’d have to commit another murder in the name of the Republic echoing in his head, but he quickly pulled out a pen and jotted down a few words in a small space on his other arm.

 

* * *

 

Jyn didn’t feel the tickling sensation this time, mostly due to the jostling of the sudden takeoff.  It was only after, when they were finally amongst the stars and the dark, that she allowed herself to relax, and compose.

 

Saw Guerrera.  Galen Erso.  Jyn.  Names she hadn’t thought about for years coming back to haunt her.  Even Jedha held a certain degree of pessimism. 

 

As she pulled up her sleeve, Jyn checked to make sure Cassian wasn’t looking.  She didn’t want to imagine what the Captain would think of the random writing scribbled all over her arms, and she was grateful her pants covered the flower on her legs.

 

_Sounds like the Empire._

 

Jyn paused, her pen in hand.  She recognized a cautious question when she saw one, and this one screamed caution.  Her pen pal was curious as to which side she belonged to, that was for sure. 

 

In front, K-2SO and Cassian were bickering about coordinates.  Unconsciously, she raised a hand to the kyber crystal hanging on a cord around her neck.  She couldn’t say she belonged anywhere, not really.

 

Far too soon, she could see Jedha approaching in the distance, as orange as a sunrise.  Jyn scrambled over to the window before she could stop herself. 

 

“That’s Jedha,” Cassian supplied, carefully preparing the ship to enter the atmosphere.  “A desert planet almost as sandy as Tatooine.”

 

“And much colder,” K-2SO broke in.   “The odds of surviving-“

 

“Have been very high.  Jedha is thriving,” Cassian interrupted.  “I heard stories, from older Resistance members.  The kyber crystals from the middle of the city, those were used to power the lightsabers of the Jedi.” 

 

Jyn remembered her father telling her stories of the dead religion.  She clutched the kyber crystal beneath her shirt. 

 

Ducking out of sight, she lifted the sleeve of her shirt.  Some of the pen markings were already starting to fade.  She found a blank space and wrote another message.

 

* * *

 

Cassian wasn’t sure what to make of the latest message.  His brain was primarily focused on the mission; finding Saw, finding Galen, following orders.  That was all he’d ever known.

 

This ghostwriter, it felt like an opportunity for something new.  Something unexpected from his normal day-to-day orders.

 

_I’m not Empire.  I’m no one._

Two sentences in one message.  He frowned at the second one.  There was no room for gray in his world.  There was black and white, with a thin line in between that, once you’d crossed, can never be reversed.

 

Distractedly, Cassian’s mind switched to Jyn.  Brought up by someone who was technically considered Resistance by the Empire, but by anyone else a troublemaker with skilled fighters at his heel, she had been on her own for so long.  If anyone considers herself as neutral as possible, it’s Jyn.

 

Cassian mentally slapped himself, sure more than ever that this whole ghostwriter business was someone playing a trick on him.  The odds of his strange pen pal being Jyn, well, he was sure K-2SO could calculate that in a heartbeat.

 

He almost asked.  Almost.

 

Jedha was rapidly approaching.  He could hear Jyn examining the blaster, making sure it was fully functional.  He pulled out his pen, and quickly jotted down a response.  Whether or not it was Jyn, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to reply for quite some time.

 

* * *

 

 

Seeing Saw again made Jyn forget all about her pen pal.

 

She’d felt a tickle on the ship, but hadn’t had time to look before Cassian and K-2SO entered Jedha’s atmosphere.  From then on, she’d been in Cassian’s sights, and she certainly didn’t want to appear crazier than he must have already thought she was. 

 

Not that she cared what he thought of her.  Not at all.

 

She used to care what Saw thought of her, back when her legs felt too lanky for her body and she would care her hair to try and fit in with the other boys.  Always trying to be the best fighter, the best shot, to make Saw proud.

 

Clearly, none of that had mattered in the end.

 

“I was sixteen years old,” she could hear herself saying.  “And you left me alone.”

 

“I gave you a blaster.”  A blaster in place of a family. 

 

“Jyn.”  Saw’s voice had changed.  There were tired scraps bleeding in through the outwardly harsh voice.  He took a drag from his oxygen tank.  “You should see this, at the very least.”

 

The holochip that Saw had been holding in his hand was suddenly projecting the image of an old man, with eyes that looked incredibly familiar to Jyn.

 

It was only when the hologram started speaking that Jyn realized who it was.  As her father spoke about placing a small trap into the planet killer, all Jyn wanted to do was stamp her foot all over the holochip and destroy any semblance of it having ever existed.  She clenched her fists, and didn’t move.  Her ears heard the plan, that there was a miniscule flaw in the Death Star’s plans.  Her eyes saw the hologram of an old man with too many years behind his eyes.  Her mind wondered how the hell she’d gotten into this mess.

 

Unconsciously, she fell to her knees.  Unbidden memories of a toy left behind on a farm, of her father’s hug and the clean smell of his uniform, of a ghost in white.  Saw took a drag from his oxygen tank.

 

On her knees, Jyn briefly noticed the words newly written on the back of her hand.

 

_Can there be two of us?_

 

And then, the world exploded.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, looks like school's started up again...BUT I finally know how I want to approach the story, so hopefully the next update won't take, well, ages...

If K-2SO had been brought into this world as an organic, humanoid being, he probably would have been grumbling.  As it happened, he was a reprogrammed droid, so he was grumbling anyway.  He wasn’t sure how long Cassian was going to be away, but he knew the odds were stacked against him, especially in a city as volatile as Jedha.

 

The ship was as he’d left it: small against the background of the Jedha desert, incredibly boring. 

 

“Built as an Imperial droid and reduced to this,” K-2 groaned, going to stand beside the ship, ready to fly out if needed.  “Definitely an irresistible choice.”

 

The sun was setting at the edge of the horizon.  If K-2 had had feelings, he supposed he would have enjoyed the slight contrast between the yellow and orange hues.  That, along with the incredibly large moon in the sky.

 

“Jedha only has three moons…how strange for one to be visible before the sun is completely down,” K-2SO wondered.  “Unless it’s what we were warned about-“

 

The horizon vanished before the flickering bulbs that made up his eyes.  All the droid could do was stare as the sun, the sky, Jedha city were all engulfed in a cloud of smoke.

 

His comlink beeped.  “K-2!”  Cassian, nervous and stressed.  Irregular behavior. 

 

“Standing by the ship, Captain.  But, there is one problem on the horizon.”

 

The comlink buzzed.  “Problem?”  Cassian’s voice was suddenly raspy.  K-2 could hear him breathing heavily on the other end.

 

“There is no horizon.”

 

K-2SO did not think that someone could have hacked into his mainframe and reprogrammed his eyes to see the cloud of dust billowing towards the ship; the odds of that were less than one percent.  Therefore, he forced himself to believe the truth: that Jedha City was collapsing. 

 

“Bring the ship over, K.  Now!”  Cassian’s voice rang angrily through the comlink, and then the connection broke. 

 

He lumbered into the ship, his gears whirring.  Multiple simulations ran through his head, more of them ending in ultimate termination than survival.

 

Still, there was that 25% chance.

 

He flew towards the immense cloud on the horizon, his eyes flickering.  The chance of survival dropped to 21%.

 

His comlink buzzed once more.  Cassian’s voice came through the static.  “K…down…”

 

K-2SO would have sighed if droids could sigh.  If droids could have rolled their eyes, he’d be doing that as well.

 

As it happened, he could do neither of those things, so he was forced to watch Cassian board the ship with four other people without so much as a single reaction.  There wasn’t much time for questioning.  Cassian grabbed the second set of controls, one of his gloves slipping off in the process.  To K-2, the words on his hands stood out like specks of dirt on an otherwise spotless medium.

 

“Come on, come on,” Cassian muttered under his breath.  There was a spot of white in the distance.  One of the strangers came up behind K-2SO, and started mumbling words under his own breath as well.

 

If he hadn’t been a droid, he would have thanked the Force that he hadn’t been reprogrammed as badly as that one.   

 

With the cloud on their tail, the X-wing entered the light.

 

“Set a course for Eadu,” Cassian said before the adrenaline left his bones, before his eyelids collapsed under the weight of the world.  One step at a time: get to Eadu, find the lab, find Galen…

 

_Focus on step 1. Worry about step 3 later._

Jyn sat in the back of the ship, her fingers threaded together.  She’d taken off her gloves. Cassian glanced at her back; her dark hair was slowly coming undone.  It fell over her shoulder like a waterfall, an open wound. 

 

His fingers traced the words on his palm unconsciously before he headed up the stairs to see if he could find a soft spot to crash on for the next few hours. 

 

Jyn heard the captain trudge up the stairs, each of his heavy footsteps captured in her mind. 

 

_Can there be two of us?_

“Is it all gone, Baze?  All of it?”  Chirrut softly asked in the darkness.

 

“Yes, the entire city,” his partner answered, his voice rough and low. 

 

_Can there be two of us?_

A young man was sitting next to Jyn, staring at the metal on the other side of the ship. 

 

 

“What’s your name?”  She asked.  They were in this together, by choice or not.  The young man kept staring at a spot just past her shoulder, his black hair falling out of a messy ponytail. 

 

He was mumbling something.

 

“Sorry?”  Jyn said.  “What was that?”

 

“I’m the pilot,” he responded, his dark eyes suddenly coming to rest on her.  “I’m the pilot, and you’re Jyn Erso.”

 

It was unnerving how quickly he’d guessed her true identity.  But, try as she might, she couldn’t look away.

 

“How did you-“

 

“Your eyes.  You’ve got y-your father’s eyes.  I’m the pilot,” he repeated again, and let his head fall back against the metal of the ship once more.

 

“He sent me.  Told me…told me I could do right by myself.”  His fingers twitched.

 

“What’s your name?”  She asked, softer this time.  The pilot’s eyes flickered between her and the empty air.

 

“Bodhi,” he finally said.  “Bodhi Rook.  I’m the pilot.”  He whispered the last part, as though it were more of an affirmation for himself.  Introduction complete, Bodhi slumped against the wall of the ship, his eyes finally closing. 

 

With a quick check to make sure everyone was sleeping or, in K-2’s case, focused on keeping them from crashing into anything, Jyn pulled out her pen.  She paused, the black tip inches away from her skin. Two people who don’t belong – would that not just mean that they belong together?  Jyn bit her lip, and sighed.  She put down her pen.

 

 _Stories are for children_ , she thought, just as new tickles began appearing on her leg.

 

She took a quick look around.  Chirrut and Baze sat in the corner, and Bodhi sat near the back of the ship, mumbling to himself.  Thinking that, if interrogated she could feign overheating, Jyn pulled up her pants leg only to watch small circles unfold upon her pale skin.  They all spiraled outwards, going on to cover most of her knee in black ink. 

 

Jyn took a breath, and started drawing her own spirals right below.  They interwove and intercrossed, circles of black weaving in an out of each other, always barely touching and crossing at one point.  It looked like they were drawing galaxies together, creating patterns out of stardust and-

 

“Alert!  We are approaching Eadu!”  K-2SO’s voice broke Jyn out of her reverie.  As soon as she stopped moving her pen, the ghostwriter’s circles ceased tickling her thighs.  She allowed herself a moment of dismay, before standing up and approaching K-2.  A moment later, she felt more than heard Cassian come up behind her.  It was like his presence was a fog, clogging up her senses. 

 

He brushed past her and got into the second pilot’s seat.  The ship was already starting to shake from the turbulence.

 

All Jyn could focus on was her father.  Suddenly, the ghostwriter did not seem all that important.  But she was about to see her father after so many years-

 

_Saw Guerrera was my father, not that old shadow I saw on the hologram._

But, try as she might, she could not shake the image of that old shadow’s smile, how safe it had made her feel.  The night of Eadu enveloped the ship like a thick blanket. Every time Jyn glanced to the side, they were narrowly avoiding yet another outcrop of rocks.  They all looked like fingers of a very greedy hand, attempting to snatch the small ship out of the air. 

 

Jyn glanced at her own hand, smothered in ink.  She tucked it back inside her glove as the ship swerved to avoid a particularly sharp rocky protrusion.  She heard a soft “oomph” as she crashed into Bodhi; Chirrut somehow stayed right where he was, perched on his seat, staff in hand. 

 

“Prepare for a shaky landing!”  Cassian called back unhelpfully as the ship crashed into first one cliff, then another.  The light flickered all around. To Jyn, it felt like a bad dream, an omen that perhaps she should have just left her father for dead and gone back to the Wobani labor camp. 

 

From her angle, she could see Cassian struggling to hold the steering wheel steady as the ship descended at a steady angle.  They flew past the rocks faster and faster, there was an explosion to her left, and amidst the rain and rocks and clouds-

 

There were marks on Cassian’s bare hands.  Black ones, that looked suspiciously like scribbles. 

 

They were falling through air, and then Jyn felt herself thrown to the other side of the ship.


End file.
